Why overseas women love Aussie men

He’s tall and handsome, with muscled arms. He runs a successful wine-exporting business and we bump into each other occasionally at a cafe.

Each time I see him, he’s just come back from, or is about to go to, Los Angeles for a ‘work’ trip.

“Jess, the women,” he says, showing off an Instagram stream of wall-to-wall beauties he’s met and cavorted with in West Hollywood nightclubs.

“Un-be-liev-able. They really love Aussies. What am I doing back here?”

It’s a question I’ve had occasion to ponder myself over several years of visiting the US.

Mingling in the company of American women at book launches or parties, my being Australian with a three-day growth and commensurately thick accent seemed to give me an advantage over the American men in the room, whose idea of ‘laid-back’ appears to be wearing a purple polo from J.Crew.

At times the effect of being an ‘Ossie’ was alarming, offline and online.

When I registered a profile on one American dating site, an excitable blonde from Arkansas wrote to tell me she’d had a dream that involved making love in the back of her pick-up truck.

Are we to believe they’re getting all this work because of acting ability alone? Why did Kathryn Bigelow cast four Australians — Jason Clarke, Joel and Nash Edgerton, and Callan Mulvey — in Zero Dark Thirty, the story of the hunt for Osama bin Laden?

It’s not like America doesn’t have its own resident population of three-day-growthscratching, T-shirt-bursting actors angling for action-movie roles.

But they’ve been largely put out of work by all these Aussies.

“[Australian men are] way hotter. There’s no competition,” Miley Cyrus said during her ill-fated engagement to Liam Hemsworth.

“I think there’s a masculinity about them that is probably like growing up in the South, like I did. They are a little bit more respectful, I suppose.”

Natalie Portman, who starred with Liam’s brother Chris in Thor, says bluntly, “There is a manliness to these guys that is lacking in a lot of American actors.”

And there’s plenty more where they came from.

Home and Away has become a transit lounge for actors wanting to make it big in Hollywood. All of them eager to out-squint each other, become the next Marvel-franchise action hero and get their faces on the cover of American GQ.

Why do Australian men currently have such a mortgage on American women’s ideal of rugged masculinity?

Oh boy ...Source:Supplied

Whether it’s the distinctive Aussie accent, the dry humour, the general resistance to grooming or just the way they express themselves, a spell has been cast.

But it’s fair to say a lot of the time they don’t get the same reaction from local women, many of whom tend to regard them with total indifference, prefer to coo over the latest paparazzi pictures of Brad Pitt, Channing Tatum and Ryan Gosling, and bat their eyelids flirtatiously at whichever dark-eyed Italian or Brazilian backpacker happens to be waiting on their table at lunch.

Which is why so many ordinary Australian men — encouraged by cheap flights to LA and Las Vegas or spurred on by connections made through online dating or Facebook — are packing their bags and trying their luck with women across the Pacific Ocean.

In the US, they’re strangely appreciated.

Why? My hunch is that American women see in Australian men an authenticity perhaps lacking in American men.

Dayum Ryan.Source:Supplied

They’re not afraid to be themselves and don’t care what others make of them.

American men can’t escape a didactic, prescriptive version of masculinity. Millions turn to books, magazines and websites to tell them what to wear, what to watch, what to say. There isn’t an American men’s magazine without a cover that screams “100 ways to …” or “50 mistakes you …” or “The 7 rules for …”

Australian men don’t give a damn about what they’re supposed to do. They aren’t afraid to grab a woman and kiss her. Or to tell her what’s really on their minds, whether it’s flattering or not. They’re extremely forward when it comes to sex. Aussie blokes might lack for some airs and graces, but at least women always know where they stand.

Australian men are also friendly and open, no matter whose company they’re in.

They’re not scared to strike up a conversation with a beggar on the street, a parking-station

attendant or a major celebrity.

“Did someone order a six pack?”Source:News Limited

It doesn’t really matter what a woman’s background is, what street she lives in or where she went to university or college.

Australian men treat everybody exactly the same. They have a low tolerance for pomposity. They instinctively barrack for the underdog. If a woman is a goodperson as well as appealing enough to want to date, that’s pretty much all that matters.

It’s nearly 30 years since Crocodile Dundee was released, and Australian men are still bewilderingly exotic to American women — though they know a bidet from a toilet and they don’t carry bush knives.

As for the rest of their qualities, what you see is pretty much what you get. It’s always been that way. And America, it would seem, just can’t get enough. If only they were more

appreciated at home.

Jesse Fink is the author of the new rock biography The Youngs: The Brothers Who Built AC/DC (Random House Australia, $34.95).